Inter-vehicle communication techniques have been being developed for improvement of safety and/or convenience of their vehicles. For example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2008-27011 discloses an example of these inter-vehicle communication techniques.
The known inter-vehicle communication technique uses an information collection center communicable with a plurality of vehicles that are running in a preset communicable region within which inter-vehicle wireless communications can be carried out.
Specifically, the known inter-vehicle communication technique is designed to establish a group in a plurality of vehicles that are running within the communicable region, and determine one of the plurality of vehicles in the communicable region as a host vehicle. After the determination, the host vehicle performs inter-vehicle communications with the other vehicles in the communicable region to collect information from the other vehicles. Then, the host vehicle uploads, to the information collection center, the collected information and information about the host vehicle.
The known inter-vehicle communication technique results in a reduction in the amount of communications traffic required to send information about each of a plurality of vehicles in the communicable region in comparison to that required if each of the plurality of vehicles individually sends, to the information collection center, the same information thereabout.